Top Washington Quotes

Favorite Washington Quotes

1. "The Bible is right: A deluge of images does encourage idolatry. Look at the cults of personality in America today. Look at Hollywood. Look at Washington. I'd like to see the next presidential race be run according to Second Commandment principles. No commercials. A radio-only debate. We need an ugly president. I know we're missing out on some potential Abe Lincolns because they'd look gawky and gangly on TV."Author: A.J. Jacobs

2. "The Washington Times wrote a story questioning the authenticity of some of the suggestions made about me in Silent Coup. But as a believer in the First Amendment, I believe they have more than a right to air their views."Author: Bob Woodward

3. "June 17, 1972. Nine o'clock Saturday morning. Early for the telephone. Woodward fumbled for the receiver and snapped awake. The city editor of the Washington Post was on the line. Five men had been arrested earlier that morning in a burglary attempt at Democratic headquarters, carrying photographic equipment and electronic gear. Could he come in?"Author: Carl Bernstein

4. "It's time to replace career politicians with citizen's politicians. It's time to elect people who are going to stand up to the Washington elite and stand up to a White House and Congress hell-bent on ramming socialism down our throat."Author: Christine O'Donnell

5. "I have been very independent from day I arrived in Washington."Author: Claire McCaskill

6. "We have great cities to visit: New York and Washington, Paris and London; and further east, and older than any of these, the legendary city of Samarkand, whose crumbling palaces and mosques still welcome travelers on the Silk road. Weary of cities? Then we'll take to the wilds. To the islands of Hawaii and the mountains of Japan, to forests where Civil War dead still lie, and stretches of sea no mariner ever crossed. They all have their poetry: the glittering cities and the ruined, the watery wastes and the dusty; I want to show you them all. I want to show you everything."Author: Clive Barker

7. "If you like Texas and you like our economy, I helped create all that and all those jobs and you will love it when David Dewhurst goes to Washington."Author: David Dewhurst

8. "People need to understand that in Washington, the process is the punishment."Author: David Frum

9. "The coup that overthrew President Chavez of Venezuela in April 2002 was greeted with euphoria in Washington. The new president—a businessman—was instantly recognized and the hope expressed that stability and order would return to the country, thus creating the basis for solid future development. The New York Times editorialized in identical language.... The coup was reversed three days later and Chavez then came back to power. The State Department soberly denied any prior knowledge about anything, saying it was all an internal matter. It was to be hoped that a peaceful, democratic, and constitutional solution to the difficulties would be arrived at, they said. The New York Times editorial followed suit, merely adding that perhaps it was not a good idea to embrace the overthrow of a democratically elected regime, however obnoxious, too readily if one of America's fundamental values was support for democracy."Author: David Harvey

10. "The Fed should make a clear commitment to stable money to reduce the swings in interest rates and inflation. Instead, it champions and flaunts unstable money. This encourages momentum trading and the growth of derivatives. Meanwhile, layers of financial regulation make Washington bigger and more powerful but don't fix the underlying problems."Author: David Malpass

11. "In all my shows, I'm not interested in the iconic shots of the Capitol and the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. I'm always interested in trying to get the culture of the place - trying to get it right."Author: David Nevins

12. "I am the Counselor at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy."Author: Dennis Ross

13. "I did my 40 years in Washington, 40-plus, and it's time to pause and reflect and think about what I've seen and done."Author: Dick Cheney

14. "Unlike the Contract with America, which was created by Washington pollsters and insiders, Families First was developed from the grassroots up. Congressional Democrats from across the country spent months meeting with people back home, asking them what issues were important to them, and what Congress could do to make their lives a little easier."Author: Dick Gephardt

15. "The country has moved off track. The people in Washington don't have the hard-nosed business experience needed to get the economy up and running."Author: Doug Ose

17. "I can think of no one that my grandparents knew, that told me stories and that I experienced myself, had any sense of social inferiority growing up in segregated Washington. None whatsoever."Author: Ed Smith

18. "It is quite common to hear high officials in Washington and elsewhere speak of changing the map of the Middle East, as if ancient societies and myriad peoples can be shaken up like so many peanuts in a jar."Author: Edward W. Said

19. "When I was to come to Washington the first time as Music Director of the Boston Symphony, Mrs. Johnson phoned us to find out if they could give us a party and who we would like to meet."Author: Erich Leinsdorf

20. "I did not come to Washington to raise the electricity rates by as much as $40 per month as this plan would do."Author: Greg Walden

21. "I grew up in a trailer park in Bellingham, Washington."Author: Hilary Swank

22. "But it's been a great, humbling - and I've been very honored to have the opportunity to serve and to lead and to be the representative of our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines who are in Washington. And it's been the greatest honor of my life."Author: Hugh Shelton

23. "According to an article in the Washington Post: The Food and Drug Administration has repeatedly urged antidepressant manufacturers not to disclose to physicians and the public that some clinical trials of the medications in children found that drugs were no better than sugar pills, according to documents and testimony released at a congressional hearing yesterday. Regulators supressed the negative information on the grounds that it might scare families and physicians away from the drugs, according to testimony by drug company executives. For at least three medications, they said, the FDA blocked the companies' plans to reveal the negative studies in drug labels."Author: Irving Kirsch

24. "Washington is a great international city and in the congregation we have people who are rich and poor, black and white, and from every part of the world."Author: James Green Somerville

25. "Money has too big an influence on our politics in Washington and somehow we need to do something about that."Author: James Hansen

26. "I would like to explore and see this country. I have had so many opportunities to see it from the air! I would like to climb the mountains that I wished I could climb at the time but had to get back to Washington."Author: Janet Reno

27. "It's time for all of us to unite across the state of Washington to build a working Washington. Let's get to work."Author: Jay Inslee

28. "I am excited about focusing full-time on talking about my job-creation agenda and building a new economy for Washington state. We have a great chance to seize our own destiny, build our own industries, and create our own technological revolutions right here at home."Author: Jay Inslee

29. "We have for too long put vast oil and natural gas reserves off limits to exploration and production, as The Washington Post editorial stated this week."Author: Jim Costa

30. "Since 2001, the U.S. government has abandoned its role as a champion of human rights and has perpetrated terrible and illegal abuses in prisons in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, sent prisoners secretly to other nations to be tortured, denied the applicability of the Geneva Convention restraints, and severely restricted time-honored civil liberties within our own country. Certain political leaders of other nations, who are inclined to perpetrate human rights abuses to quiet dissenting voices and were previously restrained by positive influence from Washington, now feel free to emulate or exceed the abuses approved by American leaders."Author: Jimmy Carter

31. "The genuflection toward 'fairness' is a familiar newsroom piety, in practice the excuse for a good deal of autopilot reporting and lazy thinking but in theory a benign ideal. In Washington, however, a community in which the management of news has become the single overriding preoccupation of the core industry, what 'fairness' has often come to mean is a scrupulous passivity, an agreement to cover the story not as it is occurring but as it is presented, which is to say as it is manufactured."Author: Joan Didion

32. "I was down in Washington when 9/11 happened. We were in the middle of putting together the next summer season, and all I could think of was something somehow must make sense to us. Our Town kept coming into my mind."Author: Joanne Woodward

33. "Washington is Hollywood for ugly people."Author: Joe Scarborough

34. "When I left Washington, we actually had a balanced budget and we paid down the most amount of the national debt in modern history and cut taxes and created jobs. And I was the chief architect of that plan in '97."Author: John Kasich

35. "I think he should let me run Ohio. He should let us, the legislature, the members there, we should be running Ohio. The states are the laboratories out here, and I think the president needs to mind to the problems that he has in Washington."Author: John Kasich

36. "In the wake of the British army's burning of the roughly 3,000 books belonging to Congress at Washington, Jefferson offered to sell the nation his own collection.42 There were 6,487 volumes in Jefferson's hands; in the words of the National Intelligencer, the library "for its selection, rarity and intrinsic value, is beyond all price."43,44 They formed the core of the new Library of Congress."Author: Jon Meacham

37. "I grew up in Chillum Heights in the Washington, D.C. area., and it was never a garden spot. When guys go, 'Hey, when I grew up, my neighborhood was tough, and it was this and that'... the reality is that it was just a terribly sad place. And thank God, I was able to escape it."Author: Jonathan Banks

38. "I know people are looking at what's happening in Washington and then they also look at events in Europe, in Greece and Portugal and other places and worry about that."Author: Julia Gillard

39. "This is about Floridians saying what's most important to them and making sure that we create an agenda that we can drive and deliver back in Washington, D.C. So it's very exciting."Author: Katherine Harris

40. "And the Blue Angels are coming back to scare the local population. I remember seeing old Vietnamese women ducking under the benches in Washington Square; they thought they were back in the war."Author: Lawrence Ferlinghetti

41. "From George Washington to George W. Bush, presidents have invoked God's name in the performance of their official duties."Author: Linda Chavez

42. "Spirituality in Washington can be more of a - I don't want to say it - but, a networking opportunity. Religion is often used opportunistically in the political conversation."Author: Mark Leibovich

43. "Watch me when people say deaf and dumb, or deaf mute, and I give them a look like you might get if you called Denzel Washington the wrong name."Author: Marlee Matlin

44. "The worst excesses of the Congress of the 1980s pale in comparison with what is going on in Washington today."Author: Marty Meehan

45. "Security is still the most important issue facing Washington state residents and millions of Americans - the security of having a job, of access to affordable health care, of a quality education, and of protecting our homeland and defending our nation."Author: Patty Murray

46. "I call crony capitalism, where you take money from successful small businesses, spend it in Washington on favored industries, on favored individuals, picking winners and losers in the economy, that's not pro-growth economics. That's not entrepreneurial economics. That's not helping small businesses. That's cronyism, that's corporate welfare."Author: Paul Ryan

47. "These facts about today's political climate in the United States, and what they imply, would have horrified Jefferson, Washington, Madison, Adams and all their friends. Whether they were atheists, agnostics, deists or Christians, they would have recoiled in horror from the theocrats of early 21st-century Washington."Author: Richard Dawkins

48. "In his self-serving view of events, Lee believed that he had performed a prodigious feat, rescuing his overmatched army from danger and organizing an orderly retreat. "'The American troops would not stand the British bayonets," he insisted to Washington. "You damned poltroon," Washington rejoined, "you never tried them!" Always reluctant to resort to profanities, the chaste Washington cursed at Lee "till the leaves shook on the tree," recalled General Scott. "Charming! Delightful! Never have I enjoyed such swearing before or since."Author: Ron Chernow

49. "Somehow, the greater the public opposition to the health care bill, the more determined they seem to force it on us anyway. Their attitude shows Washington at its very worst - the presumption that they know best, and they're going to get their way whether the American people like it or not."Author: Scott Brown

50. "Politicians in Washington and Madison aren't hearing, aren't listening to their constituents and prioritizing getting people back to work and growing our economy."Author: Tammy Baldwin